Volunteers Scramble To Aid Victims Injured Streaming In As Supplies Rushed Out

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — Through the night and until after dawn Friday, a steady stream of the volcano's most critically injured victims arrived at a military airfield and they were rushed to hospitals.

Across the city, an army of volunteers scrambled in the darkness to package and ship medicine and other desperately needed supplies for the battered towns around Nevado del Ruiz.

Within four hours at the airfield, four transport planes arrived carrying 72 injured, a fraction of the hundreds of casualties expected during the next few days.

The last flight taxied to a stop in a drizzling rain. Aboard were 10 people with injuries so severe that they were given priority and flown out of the disaster area 100 miles to the south.

As the gleaming gray and white C-130 taxied to a stop, it was surrounded by eight ambulances whose flashing lights added to the aura of tension.

There was near pandemonium in the floodlit cargo bay as doctors, nurses and civil defense workers rushed to remove the wounded. One physician too harried to give his name said the victims had compound fractures, cerebral trauma, crushed lungs ''and other severe forms of pressure-type wounds.''

As the victims were moved, a hush fell over those outside. Wrapped in blankets and their faces swathed in bandages, the casualties were carried to the ambulances with great delicacy.

The 10 on this flight came from the towns of Armero and Libano, both of which bore the brunt of the wall of mud and water unleashed by the eruption.

On the other side of Bogota, 500 men, women and children sorted through tons of food, clothing and medicine that began pouring into the International Fair shortly after a radio appeal.

Mario Suarez Melo, president of the Bogota Chamber of Commerce, is directing the volunteer effort to move critically needed items to the disaster area.

Standing in the middle of the swirl of activity, Suarez said the response to the call for volunteers was so overwhelming that he had to close the iron gates in front of the building to prevent more from entering.

''We have already moved about 250 tons of material to the airport since noon,'' Suarez said just before midnight Thursday. ''We think that before morning we will be able to move another 250 tons out to the airport for shipment south.''

The volunteers ranged from the very old to the very young, from the stylishly dressed to the obviously poor.

Twelve-year-old Maria Jose Ostina said she came because her older sister, a Girl Scout, ran out of the house calling for her to come along. Hefting large bags of clothing, the girl said, ''I'll work until I can't work. Then I'll rest and I'll come back and work until I'm no longer needed.''

Jesus Maria Galves, 32, brought his 10 Boy Scouts to the fair building to do their part. The psychology professor took his place beside his Scouts in a human chain that unloaded plastic sacks of clothing from a truck.

Volunteers worked like ants in separate, disciplined groups. Some painstakingly sorted through boxes of antibiotics, vitamins and tranquilizers to make smaller packages of the vital pharmaceuticals. Others man-handled carts overloaded with crates of canned food. Juan Jose Gomez, 23, had a special reason for the frantic pace of his work. He had left Armero four days earlier in search of work. He left behind his mother and father.

''I heard that in my town there are maybe 20,000 dead and I don't know what happened to my mother and father,'' he said. ''I'm working here to keep my mind off it.''

Gomez said police had told him all roads to his home were cut because of flooding and mudslides.

''I'm going to stay here until they tell me I can get back home. I don't have anywhere to stay or anything to eat so I'll just stay here.''

With a nod toward his new friends working beside him, Gomez said, ''I think, I hope, they will take care of me.''